Embed Flash Video In A WordPress Blog

There are many reasons why people want to add Flash videos to their WordPress blog sites. Maybe they want to introduce their website and products to their visitors, use as a training aid, show a webinar or simply show the new baby to distant relatives. What ever reason, website videos are used more and more every day.

If you have a real estate agency what could be better than a walk through tour of a property, a walk through of a yacht if you are a yacht broker or tours of sports clubs, hotels, workshops or what ever product you want potential customers to see.

You can hardly visit YouTube or Google Video to find a video about your hotel or sports club, you will have to make your own video or have it made for you. But let’s not talk about hotels and sports clubs, lets talk about you and the eBook or software program that you want to promote which is the reason lots of us have.

To get Flash video up and running we need to download some files and prepare our site. So lets get started now.

Step One: Preparing your site.

There are several plugins available for embedding flash video on your website, some are better than others and some are more user friendly. WP-FLV is one, FLV Embed is another and WordTube is the one that we will be using here. Visit the site, read up on the plugin and download it. Unpack the zip file and upload the folder into the WordPress plugins folder. Note do not change the folder names. You will also need the free, for personal use, Flash Media Player from Jeroen Wijering. Download the player from the website, unzip it and upload only the mediaplayer.swf file into the wordtube folder. Activate the plugin.

Go to your admin area, then Options, Manage, WordTube to set up the options. You can use the default upload folder or change it to another such as wp-content/videos. You can upload your files via Manage-Media Center. Note for streaming videos the Flash player will not show a preview, therefore you need also to upload a image (thumbnail) file. After uploading your video you can insert the tag (MEDIA=ID) into your post where you wish the embedded Flash video to be displayed. ID is the number of the video in the Media Centre. Make sure that you use UPPER case otherwise it will not work.

Google Instant

Last week, search engine giant, Google, announced that it was speeding up its Internet search engine by launching a product called Instant, which displays results as soon as users type in queries. It works by modifying results as more letters are typed in the search box. It is going live this week, and will be available on mobile devices as well before the end of October.

On the surface, the Instant Search system is a significant change in how we look for information online. Google believes that the new system will save between two and five seconds per search. If we take that figure on a global scale, 11 hours will be saved every second! Not bad at all, as it improves efficiency for everyone.

Not everyone is happy with this new improvement though. Predictably, one of the unhappy group would be Google's competitors, other search engines, as this new development is clearly targeted at tightening Google's strangle hold of the search market, a lead which in the last few years has slackened a bit, especially since Microsoft introduced their Bing search engine.

The surprising complaints, however, are coming from the online marketing community, especially Search Engine Optimisers. These are people who take money from you to get your website to the top of Google's rankings. With this new technology, the algorithms that they use in their craft would have to undergo a massive change. But Google has been quick to try and pacify them by saying that the core of their search technology (which decides the most relevant results) is still the same, so that they have nothing to worry about.

What will be more interesting to watch is how tools such as Instant will change the face of mobile communication as we know it. In Nigeria, with the proliferation of the Internet, especially on mobile devices, a tool such as Instant would be extremely useful in the coming elections with more searches showing up in real time and especially if more Nigerians pick up the trends and post results to the various social networking platforms, such results would be picked up VERY quickly by Google's bots and would be out for the whole world to see in no time.

Imagine a scenario where you want to know the results in the Ugbojiobo area of Edo State. All you would have to do would be to type U-G-B-O and Google would do the rest for you. The psychological effect of not having to type the full thing, hit the ‘ENTER' key, and wait for the results is enormous. Even more important is that in typing those four letters, your search engine would help with suggestions, so you can also see results in Ugbowo, Ugbomwanta, Ugboke, Ugbo Wunagweh, and other such remote places. This means people can modify their search queries on the go if something interesting pops up elsewhere. One can't help but wonder just how far this would go in helping to reduce electoral fraud...

A note of warning, though. To be able to access all of the Google Instant goodies, you have to actually be typing your search query from Google's homepage, not from the seach bar that most browsers come equipped with nowadays. I am not yet clear on whether you can use Instant directly from the address bar in Google's Chrome browser, but that is a moot point as Chrome is not available on mobile devices, yet.